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Target Site Insensitivity in Insect-Plant Interactions

  • Chapter
Molecular Aspects of Insect-Plant Associations

Abstract

By acting as a selective source of mortality in insect populations, insecticides, both natural and man-made, have wrought extraordinary changes in the genetic composition and physiology of insects. Among these changes are several fundamentally different resistance mechanisms. One of the less well understood forms of resistance is target site insensitivity (TSI), defined as the failure of a toxicant to bind to the target due to alteration in the structure or accessibility of that target site (Brooks 1976). Studies of TSI have been severely hampered by the fact that, in order to understand TSI as a resistance mechanism, it is necessary first to know what the target site and mode of action are. This is decidedly not the case for the majority of plant allelochemicals; it is, however, true for a few synthetic organic insecticides, and the phenomenon of target site insensitivity was first discovered in connection with chemical control programs that ceased working.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Entomology 320 Morrill Hall, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, 505 S. Goodwin Avenue, Urbana, IL, 61801, USA

    May R. Berenbaum

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  1. May R. Berenbaum
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  1. Agricultural Products Department, E. I. DuPont de Nemours and Company, Inc., Wilmington, Delaware, USA

    Lena B. Brattsten

  2. Department of Biochemistry, University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA

    Sami Ahmad

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Berenbaum, M.R. (1986). Target Site Insensitivity in Insect-Plant Interactions. In: Brattsten, L.B., Ahmad, S. (eds) Molecular Aspects of Insect-Plant Associations. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1865-1_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1865-1_7

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